A group who attempted to produce forgeries of India's biometrics-backed Aadhaar ID cards also tried to clone fingerprints and circumvent iris recognition software, according to media reports.

Fingerprint scanners, iris scanners, laptops, rubber stamps, Aadhaar cards, GPS devices and printing material have been recovered from the men, police said, indicating a well-established network that appeared to have bypassed extensive security mechanisms set by the Unique Identification Authority of India or UIDAI which issues the cards.

According to the India police, the accused would bypass the biometric norms of the UIDAI with fingerprint copies and tamper with the source code of the UIDAI application client (software used by Aadhaar enrolment agencies) to create a fake application.

They would then bypass the operator authentication process to create fake Aadhaar cards. The hackers would send the client application to unauthorised operators for a sum of 5, 000 rupees (US$78) each, police said.

The accused accessed the fingerprint impressions of authorised Aadhaar enrolment operators on the UIDAI system. They would then print out the fingerprints on butter paper. After this, the accused would create artificial fingerprints using polymer resin. They would log on to the Aadhaar website using the artificial fingerprints created by them.

The artificial fingerprint of the operator would then be used by multiple members of the gang to complete the process the Aadhaar card enrolment.

The police have recovered the devices and equipment used for impersonation, including 38 fingerprints on paper, 46 fingerprints manufactured by chemicals, two Aadhaar finger-scanners, two finger-scanning devices, two iris retina scanners, eight rubber stamps, 18 Aadhaar cards, a webcam, GPS equipment and a Polymer Curing Instrument.